OUR MISSION

The Rosamond Gifford Charitable Corporation (The Gifford Foundation) is a private foundation dedicated to the stewardship of the funds entrusted to its care by Rosamond Gifford in 1954. The Foundation is committed to using its financial and human resources to build the capacity of individuals and organizations to enhance the quality of life for the people of Central New York.

GRANTMAKING PHILOSOPHY

Through our grantmaking, we fund organizations in an intentionally transformative and flexible manner. It is our fundamental belief that change at the individual and/or organizational level holds the potential to institute change at broader community levels.

Through our neighborhood work, our goal is to help neighborhood residents expand their vision for the future, provide the resources and tools to achieve their vision and insure their access and inclusion in civic discourse concerning their community. We are particularly interested in supporting populations that lack influence and opportunity in their respective surroundings.

Through our community grantmaking, we work in partnership with not for profit organizations. Our goal is to encourage strong, capable and durable organizations, which in turn represent the foundation for a strong community. Our grantmaking is designed to provide opportunities for honest reflection, assessment and action steps, including collaborative partnerships, that will help organizations become more sustainable and better able to serve the community.

NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVES

In 2003, the Foundation committed to focusing a substantial portion of its annual community investment towards a specific initiative. The board elected to “embed” the Foundation into a neighborhood on Syracuse’s Southside. A 30-block area previously disenfranchised both physically and fiscally was selected as a focus for revitalization. During 2008 the Foundation began to develop a similar initiative on the Near West Side of Syracuse. For more information on these resident-driven initiatives, please see the Initiatives section of this website.

COMMUNITY CAPACITY INITIATIVE

In the Fall of 2007, the Foundation committed to a new direction in grantmaking. The nature of many nonprofits’ missions requires annual subsidies from foundations, corporate, government and individual donors to fund their operating budgets, which can lead to some dependency. Although a certain amount of dependency is to be expected, dependency that subtly shifts organizational responsibility and destiny control away from the nonprofit to a foundation or other funder is a phenomenon the Gifford Initiative will seek to reverse. Thus through a series of value-added investments, e.g. investments in capacity-building activities along with program grants, Gifford’s ADVANS Initiative and its community capacity grants will reinforce the dynamic of “destiny control.”

The Foundation offers grants for both traditional program funding and for capacity building; the process involves an exploration, with organizations, of their ability to foster and sustain their activities in order to reach the greatest impact to the community.